Oceans Delay Global Warming — Again

Any supposed "global warming" is on temporary hiatus thanks to Earth's deep oceans trapping the sun's heat, according to Colorado's federally-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Australia's Bureau of Meterology. Researchers published these results in the September 18 edition of Nature Climate Change.

They concluded that global temperatures will continue to rise in the next century but will do so sporadically. The ability of deep oceans to hold heat will interrupt temperature increases for a decade or more at a time. They say this is the reason Earth's atmospheric temperature has not risen much despite nonstop increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

News of oceans' cyclical heat-trapping ability hardly comes as a surprise. Indiana University explains, "The bulk of thermal energy at the Earth surface is stored in the oceans." It takes a single drop of water approximately 1,000 years to completely cycle through the global ocean currents.

However, authors of the newly-published research are still pessimistic. "This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean," wrote NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, who helped write the report. "The heat has not disappeared, and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences."

Trenberth is one of the infamous Climategate scientists disgraced in 2009 when hundreds of hacked e-mails sparked accusations of fraud and corruption among climatologists. He wrote in one of the e-mails, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." Apparently, Trenberth has found his scapegoat in the deep oceans.

But this isn't the first time climate doomsayers have blamed the oceans for interfering with their predictions. An article published in the summer 2000 edition of the science and technology magazine 21st Century reported:

For 15 years, modelers have tried to explain their lack of success in predicting global warming. The climate models had predicted a global temperature increase of 1.5° C by the year 2000, six times more than that which has taken place. Not discouraged, the modelers argue that the heat generated by their claimed 'greenhouse warming effect' is being stored in the deep oceans, and that it will eventually come back to haunt us.

The article highlighted research by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealing substantial temperature changes in deep oceans around the globe. Those scientists estimated that oceans had been trapping extra heat for 40 years. "The ocean-induced delay in global warming also suggests to some climatologists that future temperature increases will be toward the top end of the models' range of predictions," wrote Richard Kerr in the March 24, 2000 issue of Science Magazine. He said experts predicted the oceans will release heat and raise global temperatures by as much as 4.5 C by the end of the 21st century.

Taken together, the research outlined in these two articles indicates that for the past half-century or so, missing temperatures which should have been frying the atmosphere have instead been lurking at the bottom of the oceans. Such information raises the question of whether the climate "crisis," and the models climatologists use to foment it, are all washed up.